Rich pickin's at the Canal Street post office today. It seems they have recreated a mini Prince Street Station within its huge, marbeled halls. And I was able to use my key to PO Box 19...to open PO Box 19...at Canal Street. They actually took out all the old boxes from the old station and built new walls to put them in.

First, the next issue of Go! Always a good thing. On the editorial page a picture of my cousin, who wrote the editorial, as a baby in her mother's arms. My mothers' sister.

Then, a small, stiff envelope from the US Government: I didn't even open it. I knew what was inside. A large envelope from them, too. That I opened...my original certificate of citizenship returned (I had to send it in to get what was in the other envelope, and I was very nervous about it after all the snarl-ups I've experienced in this pro-trac-ted process). It was in one piece.

Then, a letter from the IRS. Uh-oh. Oh boy. I opened it at once. Never delay bad news. Inside it was a letter saying that...they were paying me back! A lot! Like enough to more than justify what I spent today having my Heywood Wakefield chairs reupholstered. And then some.

Jeepers. I opened the little stiff envelope at home. The emotion that was absent at the swearing-in arrived when the little blue book was in my hand. My passport.

I was converted to these flamboyant lilies a couple of years ago, after The Lily Garden popped a bonus bulb into my order. I thought I would hate it, that first year, but, while I was suspicious, watching its huge, painted petals unfurl, it was the scent at night on the terrace, and the night pollinators drawn to its suggestive inner sanctum, that seduced me.

This plant, one of three, now, is about seven feet tall, and would be stunning in a broader border.

I know this won't make me popular in this neck of the woods, but I wouldn't mind a couple more crashing thunderstorms. I look forward to walking home in the rain, feet out of my slippery flip- flops, clean water rushing through the streets, feet bare in street streams.

Monday, June 29, 2009

I had bought a huge tomato. And I was thinking of how there is often a platter of them on the bar at Fiorello (one of the best bars to sit at in the city, drooling over all the antipasti on display): fat slices, lightly herbed.

First I salted and peppered my slice. Then I chopped herbs. I wanted my tomato heavily herbed. Then I drizzled some deep green olive oil over the top.

A quick fix for a bare spot...I bought some tall green Nicotiana langsdorfii yesterday at GRDN. Retail therapy was needed. The Russians are coming, and I became insecure about the terrace, looking at it with a jaundiced, post-May-roses eye.

The Russians are Olga and Elena, and their RTVi crew, making an episode or maybe episodes about New York roof gardens. They found 66 Square Feet and we met on Friday to talk about possibilities. I did my best not to fall into my Russian accent, assumed occasionally to make Vince weak at the knees. I think the Russians will be a great asset for the Communist Party, tentatively planned for later this year, to celebrate citizenship and birthdays and husbands and blogging friends. Comrade.

Anyway, there will be an interview in the 66 square feet, as well as a crew shadowing visits to some roof gardens already in existence, and some in the making.

Sprucing up was needed. The climbing Iceberg rose is looking sad, post severe blackspot, and I know it wants to go into some real, deep soil. When we move later this year, will it come with us? All depends on what we find to rent. And that is a mission, Finding the Right Place. It must have outdoor space, and I would love a roof, but we will have to see what is available.

It will be hard, and sad to leave this little terrace and sunny apartment, but the noisy neighbours who crash around in the wee hours of the morning are making it a lot easier to get ready to leave.

It will be exciting looking at neighbourhoods together. The flavors of each are unique and sometimes subtly different. One has things to consider such as aspect, light, garden space, space- for-friends-to-eat-together (priority), view, subway, sunsets, shops...Atlantic Avenue has spoiled me completely. How do I leave Sahadi's??? Maybe I won' t need to.

The seed-sown cosmos is making buds. I would still like to visit Lesotho when the cosmos is in bloom. How it got there in such numbers I don't know, since it appears to be Mexican.

Then again, if we applied the same standards to exotic and alien and non-native humans as we do to plants, we'd all have to go back home.

Wherever that is. And whenever that is. When does who you are start? Through how many generations of bloodstreams does your DNA have to course to turn indigenous? If you are a plant, never.

If you are a human that is hard.

Imagine. North America draining swiftly and returning to Mexicans and First Nations. And they in turn back-paddling across the Beiring Straits? Beige South Africans schlepping back to Germany, France, England, Holland, to shiver under unfamiliar skies. South America seeing mass exodus. Spain popping at the seams. Australia returning to didgeridoo-accompanied silence. All going back to the native ranges.

The newer part of the Liz Christy Community Garden on East Houston is planted mostly with vegetables, herbs and fruit. The cobble-lined gravel path has been completed and looks very good.

The park I must still design for the lot across the road on 2nd Avenue's corner has been put on the back burner until my garden design plate has been cleared a little. Hopefully I will be able to dedicate some weeks in late July or August to its creation on paper, and we intend to plant it come September.

Good Food Blogs

Reasons to Dogear a Page

We have art, Nietzsche said, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

How will we know it's us without our past?

...How'll it be not to know what land's outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know - and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can't. The willow tree is you.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

Necessity knows no magic formulae - they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assissi's shoulders.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood. "Yes, it is certified now."

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

The garden paths were lit by coloured lamps, as is the custom in Italy, and the supper table was laden with candles and flowers, as is the custom in all countries where they understand how to dress a table, which when properly done is the rarest of all luxuries.

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

(Mrs Cadwallader to Dorothea)

"I know it's a great temptation to go mad, but don't go in for it, you wouldn't like it."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

"A is for dining Alone...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my ever-increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an act that should not be indulged in lightly."

MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran with them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Richard Chaston (1620-1695). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?